Hooky taught her to read the surf, starting again and again.
“Look at the shadows,” he said, standing behind her one morning, Hooky towering over her and then bending down to match her eye line as he swept his sinewy arm across the ocean. “They show you where the wave is about to break. Look at them long enough and you see the patterns. The sea is not random. It follows shapes as solid and constant as the mountains—and of course that’s what they are.”
“I see it,” she said.
“No jazz?”
“No jazz, Hook.”
“It’s the sport of kings, this is,” he said.
“Kings?” The Legionnaires were a lot of things, but kings they were not.
“Absolutely. I know you think we’re just a bunch of crazies doing a sport nobody’s ever heard of, but surfing was the birthright of the kings of Hawaii, right over there, an ocean’s throw away.”
“You ever been to Hawaii?”
“Once,” he said, as he picked up his board and she did the same. “I’ll tell you the story sometime.” But for now he was scanning the waves, and they paddled out. Beyond the breakers they stopped and floated.
“You pick it up in Hawaii?”
“First time, yeah,” he said. “This was with a group who were bringing it back. See, when the missionaries came to the Hawaiian Islands, at that time there were nearly two hundred thousand natives, Frannie. This was a huge bunch of people. And they all surfed, but the greatest of all were the royals. The kings surfed these gigantic boards made of local oa wood. No fins, no nothing. Every king and princess. They were lords of the land and they greeted it each morning from the water. And then…”
“What? They stopped?”
“The white guys never understood. They thought it was obscene, the men and women surfing out there. Soon enough it was all over. But you watch, sister. The kings’ll have their day yet.”
Frannie reached behind her and pulled something out of the strap of her one-piece as they sat.
“There’s a wave,” he said, and started to go, and stopped when he saw her.
She was holding the bamboo stick, which she had found again in the floorboard of her mother’s car. She was using it as a spyglass. She looked through it to see Hooky with that cowlick over one eye, smiling curiously.
“Whatcha got there?”
“Something that a poor girl reached out to me through,” Frannie said. “I’m glad you’re here to say goodbye to it.”
She let the spyglass bamboo slip into the sea with a whispered prayer for the dead. Looked out to the horizon, reading the waves. A swell was building, and she breathed, the sun drenching her shoulders and filling her with the energy of kings. “You see it?”
“I see it.”
“Go, man, go,” she said.
They started to paddle. “I catch a better ride, I’ll make you listen to more History of Surfing,” he said.
“I catch a better ride,” she said, “and I’ll make you tell it.”
All these things happened and June seemed to last a year, summer curling on with rhythm but no end, just getting better, the surf getting stronger, Truly and Betty’s act getting tighter, calls from the Sullivan show in preparation for their appearance more and more frequent, Newp just bouncing through it all with glee.
But all waves curl and flatten away. Something else had heard the call and was already on the prowl.
Chapter 22
Frannie was half listening to Newp answer her question about how the Labor Day show preparations were going on as they bobbed in the waves, looking for the next big one. There were beads of water on his shoulders and she was tempted to lean over and touch them, to burst the tiny mounds of water, to watch capillarity fall apart and the liquid spread out.
He was looking away and now he turned his head towards her. “Right now we’re mainly working on the set for the luau. That should get on TV and I know the Sullivan guys will be watching.”
“Luau?” Frannie asked. She wasn’t sure she’d heard of this. “When?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s...” his face darkened, as though he suddenly realized he was in a chess game he wasn’t expecting. “Fourth of July. But it’s a drag. You know, it’s basically a barbecue.”
“I know what a luau is in general, Newp.” She considered, what are you suddenly nervous about but decided to give Newp more time with this. “So you’re going to be playing this luau on the 4th of July?”
“Yeah. Yes. Right. You know but forget I mentioned it.”
This was definitely something to ask Truly and Betty about.
“Are you working tonight?” he said, and she could picture a tiny pilot in his head hitting a button marked change the subject! Retreat! Dig this: she was sixteen and he was eighteen and she could squish his ability to maneuver a conversation between her toes. Actually it was worse; he did it to himself.
“No, Newp, it’s my night off, remember?”
“We’re gonna head to the Rubidoux Drive-In, watch Steve McQueen. You interested?”
Was she. But: “My folks have been hassling me to spend more time with them,” she said. “I gotta stay in.”
He nodded, looking down.
“You understand, right?” she asked, forgetting all about whatever he was hiding earlier, now looking at his sulkiness and wanting not to be the source of it. “They keep saying I’m never there, like I’ve gone off to college while I still live with them.”
“Sure,” he said, and started to paddle. “Yeah, okay. Surf’s up, Fran.”
They paddled for the coming swell and Frannie cursed the meshuge plan her pop had come up with. Her old man had been hassling her to see a better class of people than these beach bums—their words, though they’d never met any of the Legionnaires—and Pop had set up a date with someone, the son of a friend, one of the Regents at the college. It was a total stay-in-and-die night.
At 4:45 they were carrying in their boards and they stopped by the stairs. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Newp said. He put his arm around her, but too ol’ pal o’mine, and she turned and looked up at him.
“Newp, what do you think—”
He was toweling off his head and he stopped, his arm up, waiting for her to finish this sentence.
She couldn’t finish it. She didn’t want to know what he thought of her or about her or if there was any such thought at all. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that even if she could out-logic him, she loved learning from him and she ached with the need to get closer, to learn more, even as scarlet and dime-novel as that sounded. She wanted to matter to him the way these occasional girls that the Legionnaires brought down seemed to matter, the ones with the curves, the scarves and low-cut blouses and white capris. Those women seemed to exude sex the way a playground slide exuded fun. They were slides on a teenage roadside, promising dips and dives that Frannie couldn’t even put on a postcard. Straight lines for Frannie, none of the curves or the exuding of anything but energy and muscle, now.
And usually it was okay, energy was good, she could fight with the Legionnaires when one of them stole her packed lunch and she threw sand and they would toss her around. But what was she? Whatever it was, it wasn’t coming to the luau, whenever that was.